Event
How Do You Say ‘Caméra-Stylo’ in Hindi?
In 1969, three unusual films started doing the rounds of the film festival circuit in India: Basu Chatterjee’s Sara Aakash (The Whole Sky), Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome, and Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti (His Daily Bread, released 1970). To contemporary audiences, the near-simultaneous appearance of these films — distinguished by their fresh-faced casts, whimsical editing, and naturally lit images of the world outside of studio sets — felt like a long-awaited breath of fresh air. Had the “New Wave” moment finally arrived in India? This talk maps the encounter between New Wave filmmaking and Hindi literary culture, contrasting the Parisian inspirations of the French literature-cinema nexus with the Indian emphasis on the mofussil (provincial, or ‘backward’) region. Analyzing three intermedial forms that emerged from the encounter between print and celluloid, the talk concludes by identifying the factors that pushed Indian literature and cinema apart in the 1990s.
Vikrant Dadawala is a PhD candidate in English and Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in South Asia, Safundi, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.